Monday, March 14, 2016

Announcing meshCurve: A CAD-free Low Order to High-Order Mesh Converter

The description of meshCurve is provided in AIAA Paper No. 2015-2293. The primary developer is Jeremy Ims, who has been supported by NASA and NSF. Zhaowen Duan also made major contributions. By the way, Aerospace America also highlighted meshCurve in its 2015 annual review issue (on page 22). Many congratulations to Jeremy and Zhaowen on this major milestone!

The current version supports both the Mac OS X and Windows (64 bit) operating systems. The Linux version will be released soon.

Here is roughly how meshCurve works. The input is a linear mesh in the CGNS format. Then the user selects which boundary patches should be reconstructed to high-order. After that, geometrically important features are detected. The user can also manually select or delete features. Next the selected patches are reconstructed to add curvature. Finally the interior volume meshes are curved (if necessary). The output mesh is also stored in CGNS format.

We have tested the tool with meshes in the order of a million cells. But I still want to lower your expectation. So try it out yourself and let us know if you like it or hate it. Please do report bugs so that improvements can be made in the future.

Good luck!

Oh, did I mention the tool is completely free? Here is the meshCurve link again.